Gabriel González Videla's Presidency, 1946-52

Chile quickly became enmeshed in the cold war, as Moscow and
especially Washington meddled in its affairs. That friction resulted in
the splitting of the CTCh in 1946 into Communist and Socialist branches
and then the outlawing of the PCCh. The Socialists were now opposed to
the Communists and aligned with the (American Federation of
Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, the AFL-CIO), having grown
closer to United States labor interests during World War II.

Once in office, González Videla (president, 1946-52) rapidly turned
against his Communist allies. He expelled them from his cabinet and then
banned them completely under the 1948 Law for the Defense of Democracy.
The PCCh remained illegal until 1958. He also severed relations with the
Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.

Controversy still swirls around the reasons for this aboutface .
According to González Videla and his sympathizers, the repression of
the Communists was necessary to thwart their plots against his
government, although no evidence has been found to substantiate that
claim. According to the Communists and other critics of González
Videla, he acted under pressure from the United States and out of a
desire to forge closer economic and military bonds with the dominant
superpower. Historians have established that the president wanted to
appease the United States, that the United States encouraged a crackdown
on Chilean Communists, and that the United States government appreciated
González Videla's actions and thereafter expanded the scope of its
loans, investments, and technical missions to Chile. The United States
and Chile also agreed to a military assistance pact while González
Videla was president. However, no conclusive evidence has come to light
that the United States directly pushed him to act.

Although González Videla feared Communist intentions and respected
the wishes of the United States government, he also turned against the
PCCh for other reasons. He hoped to mollify right-wing critics of his
government, especially landowners, to whom he guaranteed a continuing
moratorium on peasant unionization. He sought to remove any ideological
justification for a military coup. He also wanted to weaken the labor
movement in a time of economic uncertainties, slow growth, and rising
inflation, when the PCCh was promoting strikes. González Videla's
banning of the Communists coincided with his movement away from social
reform in favor of the promotion of industrial growth.

As the Radical years (1938-52) drew to a close, Popular Frontstyle
coalition politics reached a dead end. The Radicals had swerved to the
right, the Socialists had splintered and lost votes, and the Communists
had been forced underground. Although the middle and upper classes had
registered some gains in those fourteen years, most workers had seen
their real income stagnate or decline. Often a problem in the past,
inflation had become a permanent feature of the Chilean economy, fueled
by the deficit spending of a government that had grown enormously under
the Radical presidents. Progress had been made in industrialization, but
with little benefit to the majority of the population. Promoting urban
industries did not generate the growth, efficiency, employment, or
independence promised by the policy's advocates. World War II had left
the country more dependent than ever on the United States, which by then
had become the dominant economic power in Latin America.

Populist development strategies had proved viable during the 1930s
and 1940s. The protection and credit that went along with
import-substitution industrialization had kept manufacturers satisfied.
Although penalized and forced to accept low prices for their foods,
agriculturalists welcomed expanding urban markets, low taxes, and
controls over rural workers. The middle class and the armed forces had
applauded state growth and moderate nationalism. The more skilled and
organized urban workers had received consumer, welfare, and union
benefits superior to those offered to other lower-class groups.

These allocations postponed any showdown over limited resources, thus
enabling right and left to compromise. Political institutionalization
and accommodation prevailed, partly because the unorganized urban poor
and especially the rural poor suffered, in effect, from marginality.
Starting in the 1950s, however, social demands outpaced slow economic
growth, and the political arena became increasingly crowded and heated.
In addition, accelerated mobilization, polarization, and radicalization
by ideologically competing parties placed more and more stress on the
"compromise state" to reconcile incompatible demands and
projects.

By 1952 Chileans were alienated by multiparty politics that produced
reformist governments, which would veer to the right once in office.
Chileans were tired of politiquería (petty politics, political
chicanery, and pork-barrel politics). Citizens were also dismayed by
slow growth and spiraling inflation. They showed their displeasure by
turning to two symbols of the past, the 1920s dictator Ibáñez and the
son of former president Alessandri.

In an effort to "sweep the rascals out," the voters elected
the politically unaffiliated Ibáñez back to the presidency in 1952.
Brandishing his broom as a symbol, the "General of Victory"
ran against all the major parties and their clientelistic system of
government. He made his strongest attacks on the Radicals, accusing them
of mismanagement of the economy and subservience to the United States.

Along with the short-lived Agrarian Labor Party (1945-58), a few
Communists backed Ibáñez in hopes of relegalizing the PCCh; a few
Socialists also supported him in hopes of spawning a workers' movement
similar to Peronism in Argentina. Other leftists, however, endorsed the
first token presidential campaign of Salvador Allende in order to stake
out an independent Marxist strategy for future runs at the presidency.
Allende received only 5 percent of the vote, while Ibáñez won with a
plurality of 47 percent. As it always did when no candidate captured an
absolute majority, Congress ratified the top vote-getter as president.